WHAT I HAVE

Jeffrey has a car. I don’t. Of course I don’t. I don’t have things, and I will never have such a thing as big as a car. I don’t have money and I do not have things. He does. He has from the beginning. In the beginning he had all sorts of things I didn’t: his own apartment – one in Manhattan and one in the town he went to school in. I had to hide that I d did not have things.

I was glad that my parents’ house looked, at least from the outside, a little bit grand. And our first time there – no one else was there so I could sort of pretend I had more independence than I did.

He came in the summertime, for a few days, this boy from the writing class in the college that I went to once a week. He took the train to my town and I picked him up in the green VW station wagon my mother had left for me. She had gone away with my two little sisters to spend a couple weeks in someone’s lake house. It was their vacation and I didn’t have to go. So I had this house and this car and this boy and I could pretend I had more.

We went upstairs to my room with the slanted ceilings at the top of the house and he asked to look at my records. I’d seen his records, cartons of them in red plastic milk crates. I had about ten records. I did not know how people got big record collections like his. One record emptied my wallet – and how to choose, one at a time?

I had one Dylan album though Dylan was my favorite artist. I just waited for his songs to come on the radio, but Jeffrey had all the records and they were beat up and well listened to and he knew which songs were on which album and what order they’d come out in.

I had the great hits double record. I had no idea what album each song came from I just knew all the words.

Jeffrey didn’t have a car then, but a year or two later his uncle passed one his used Mercedes. Jeffrey drove it out to my parents’ house. It was winter time and we had broken up for so many weeks that I had really thought that boyfriend was gone and I felt my heart was ripped out and sad. I had said we had to stop, but I knew if I didn’t say it he would, and that would be worse. How could he stay with me – when he had two ex-girlfriends to my none. When he had friends and so much in his life. I couldn’t bear waiting for him to realize how little I had to offer.

But he came back in the big white boxy Mercedes and picked me up and drove me into Manhattan where now I was going to live in a school dorm, and we went to the movies and we ate dinner in a restaurant and I thought maybe I could have this back, maybe he really would stay with me. He’d been crying hard when he called.

And a few years alter we prepare to drive to California. We live together in an apartment now, a fancy one his family owns and Jeffrey wants to go to Los Angeles where he will become a film director. I am certain this will happen for him. Things like that will not happen for me, but Jeffrey has already written a novel – it is a beautiful thick typed manuscript. It is so gorgeous to look at. I read it. I don’t like it. It is about people I don’t like – people who have a lot of friends, who have lovers easily and are much more blasé than I know how to be. These are the people Jeffrey likes, I think. And I know I’m not like them.

We will drive to California, says Jeffrey. I am going too. What else will I do? There is nothing else I can do. I cannot stay here in New York by myself. This boy, this passion, these words of love and sometimes hate are the only things I value that I have.

CLIPS

My father and I are in the living room. No one else is there. He is putting on my socks and shoes, yellow ankle socks. He has never done this before. My mother is the one who does this.

It’s a dark living room with dark bookshelves up to the ceiling. I stick one foot out at a time. My father holds first one in his hand, then the other, fitting a yellow ankle sock over each one.

I go to the neighbor’s house. They are two very old people with gray hair. their house is white and dark inside. Sometimes I go there by myself.

In New York City the streets near where I live are very cold and a dark grey color.

Where I work now there is light. The wood of my desk is pale and there is a skylight overhead that lets a lot of sunlight into the room. In summer I have to tie a brightly colored piece of cloth over my desk for shade.

When I walk in New York City that first winter I wear a long brown coat with a hood. I feel like a glamorous fairy tale figure in it. It is perfect and different form anything I have ever seen. My mother bought it for me. We went to Macy’s together. It cost one hundred dollars. It is the most expensive piece of clothing I have ever had.

In Virginia my coat is red red red with white fluff around the hood. It is a ski jacket. My mother calls my coat a ski jacket. I picked it from the Sears catalog and she ordered it. Our house when I am wearing the red ski jacket is large and white with fancy furniture that doesn’t belong to us. There are fields all around the house, sometimes with cows. My mother buys my sister and I two baby chicks at Easter time. One is bright pink, the other bright purple. As the chicks slowly grow up, their bright dyed colors fade to the tips of their feathers, as if the color were washing away. We move again and the chicks don’t come with us.

To get to the house you have to drive up the hill from the main road on a long dirt road. at one point on the drive up you have to go slow over the cattle grid. It is a metal grate set in the road. Cows won’t walk across it because their hooves will get stuck between the bars. The cows belong to someone else. The land, everything, belongs to someone else who I never see. We just live here. We live here twice. We come and go, and come back because my father likes this house. We live in one house in the summer and the big white one in the winter.

In the summer the house we are in is dark and shady and musty and acts like no one has looked after it for a long time. Things don’t work in this house. It’s a bit like camping out. My father sits outside on the grass and drinks a beer there. He eats cantaloupe because it’s not fattening. My father its trying to lose weight. He eats Ry-Vita instead of bread. His stomach is big.

I walk home from school down a road through green woods and I think the whole time about the rabid foxes that all the grown-ups keep talking about. One will come out of the woods any minute. I know it.

My grandfather sits with my father on the grass. My grandfather does not talk much. He looks grouchy and sad almost all the time. Sometimes he cries a little. He is visiting from Hungary. He and I don’t talk to each other because he doesn’t speak English, but I don’t think my grandfather would say much anyway. His wife, my grandmother, talks more, and my father, their son, talks most of all. My father is never quiet. My mother is quiet, as if she can’t think of what to say.

My father buys a reel-to-reel tape recorder while we are in this summer house. He shows it to us in the dark living room. The tape recorder makes him happy. He likes to press its buttons and make it work. No one else touches it. It’s his.

Here too is when I take a test because they want to put me in a different school. My father tells me I have passed the test. He is pleased. This is good.

They want me to leave my school. The one they put me in is newer, more modern. with bright lights and hallways. The school I leave behind is dark with a staircase and kind Mrs. Turner who never gets angry with me. She has brown hair she wears pinned up in a bun. Her desk is at the back of the classroom. The desks are in long rows, one child behind the next. During recess I play jump rope – two girls hold each end, turning the long rope. I stand to the side, getting the rhythm of their turning until in I leap and I am jumping and we yell out PAUL JOHN GEORGE RINGO over and over, and the one that trips you up is the one you are in love with.

Down the Rabbit Hole

It is cold and not cold at the same time, the sun moving in and out of clouds, the wind whipping up from time to time, but the colors always extra clear in the moments of strong sunshine – white rock, new green leaves, lilac blossoms fragrant, pale and dark in places.

I walk with Fred, taking it allin. We walk slowly. It is a way to be together. When I am alone I walk quickly – not always at full clip, but I never walk slowly. I never amble.

But in this walk I am content to move differently, to stay connected as we move through the trees on the wide path, other people passing from time to time. Tamar the dog runs ahead, looks back to make sure we’re still there, then runs again. She too is happy to be in a new landscape, one she doesn’t know at all.

“Do you mind walking this slow?” Fred asks. He’s much more fond of this pace than I am. “No, this is good,” I say, and really I am glad to be together here.

I have many memories of this place that I have known for almost 20 years, and as I walk I remember being here with other people – the first time was with my two sisters and my mother. Anasuya brought us here that day, the sister who was living in the ashram then. I had only just moved in. I felt like the younger sister because she was so confident. She knew the ashram, she even knew this beautiful place to bring us to.

As I walk with Fred I remember that day, mostly the photographs we took. My mother wanted photos of all three girls together. Anasuya led the way all day. She had been bossing us around for 15 years since the day she took us by surprise and swallowed a bottle of pills while we were all in the house with her. She scared the hell out of us though none of us knew that.

So we trod carefully around Anasuya. When my mother asked us to pose for the photographs, Anasuya struck a goofy pose and Esther and I followed her lead. I have these photos. I can see my forced smile that is supposed to say I am having fun, that my sisters and I knew how to have fun together. I will go to any extent she asks of me to prove this is true. I don’t care about anything else. I am ready to throw myself away.

As Fred and I are nearing the end of our walk – after we have sat on white rocks and looked out over the whole valley and I have asked Fred to take pictures of me and Tamar, realizing as I ask him that it is new for me to ask for photos, usually I take them.

I don’t want to get to the end of the long oval trail, and I let our pace get even slower. Fred begins to tell me about the book he is reading about a man who almost became a priest and I am so glad that Fred is talking because often I know his mind is full though he isn’t speaking, so I am glad that he is spontaneously telling me about what’s in this book except now we are walking even more slowly and I feel my old impatience rising. I want to go a little faster, but I can’t because I am with Fred I think – and suddenly I am with my father and he is walking much more slowly than me and he is talking at me as if he cannot see me about the book he is reading, and I am pulling inside to race ahead and escape, but I can’t, I must stay here, crawling, and I can’t tell anyone because I am feeling the wrong thing.

Now I want to get to the car immediately. I am tired. I am not interested in the little girl who wants to pet Tamar. I am cold. Fred mentions the color of the water and I respond with a distracted word or tow. I want this all to be over. I want to sit, be warm. I want tea and cake.

“Do you want to walk down to the waterfall?” Fred asks. Another walk? Is he crazy? “I can’t,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m just suddenly out of energy.”

Fred looks a little disappointed and I feel I am cutting something short, but I don’t know what else to do. We get in the car and Fred asks me to drive down a lane to the side to find the place he parked once in the eighties – I am sure we won’t find what he is looking for, everything is in the wrong place, he keeps saying things I am sure are wrong.

“Why are you objecting to everything I say?” he asks, and I realize maybe it’s not just all him.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know.”

Array

My mother had the big bed in her room. She put my baby sister on that bed when it was time to change her diapers. “Watch she doesn’t roll!” she almost sang to me, saying it with the same lilt as if it were a nursery rhyme every time. I knew I was to watch my baby sister and make sure she didn’t roll off the bed for the few moments that my mother left the room.

This was also the room where I stood in my party dress with the stiff petticoat beneath its skirts. My mother’s room was for special things. The narrow closet held her dress-up clothes, the narrow sleeveless dress, a cream colored background, a burgundy pattern, a line-like texture.

This was the room my father was in one morning, in the bed by himself, my mother up long before. My father lies in the messed up sheets. He smells a little sour so I don’t want to get too close. He is happy. He is singing Hungarian songs and wants me to sit on the bed and listen. I don’t like this song he sings. It is sad and slow, but he likes it. The song lasts a long time. I wait and wait for it to be done so I can go.

When my grandmother comes she stays in this room. I walk in one morning and catch her only half-dressed. I laugh at this old lady in her strange bloomers. It is fun to see my grandmother like this. My mother comes in and shushes me and scoots me out of the room as if she were embarrassed.

The stairs that lead downstairs are narrow and steep. They have a brown rubber mat down the middle, covering the middle part of each wooden stair. My sister squeezed the hamster on one of the stairs while I was taking a nap. It was an accident. She didn’t mean to.

My sister has blonde hair and round red cheeks. She is my mother’s child the way I am my father’s. She falls off the tricycle that is mine. It has blue and white long plastic streamers attached to the handlebars and she falls off it and my mother spends the whole night with her because she has cut herself and it hurts a lot. My sister hurts herself often.

We re stuck in this house. My father brings gifts from his trips away. He brings presents that are like magic, sweet perfume from inside his suitcases.

My father teaches me to tie my shoes. He takes me to the bank on Saturday with a silver dollar that we give to the man there. I sit on the counter. He takes me to a house and we buy a blue bicycle form a man there and bring it home, my first one with two wheels that you have to balance on. My father reaches down to the ground and picks up a pale green leaf. He separates the nub in the middle and shows me how now it will stick to my nose. He says that’s what they did when he was little.

My father is home on weekends, outside, in sunshine. Sometimes he pushes a red wheelbarrow that only adults can pick up and push. It looks easy, but I have tried and I can’t do it. Just like I can’t put my foot on the shovel the way my mother does and get it to go into the ground. I show my father my somersaults as he goes by with the red wheelbarrow.

My sister stays near my mother. There is something a little bit wrong with them. I can tell it is my father that people like. I don’t ever want to be like my mother, the way my sister is: shy, they call it, quiet. My mother likes plants. She looks at leaves and birds closely and says their names. There must be something wrong with that. My father simply marches through the outdoors, taking it in with spirit and pleasure, enjoying the scent of the air.

THE LANDING

The living room always had one wall covered with book-filled bookshelves up to the ceiling. They were there when I was little and there again when we returned to the house a decade or so later.

The bookshelves were made of dark wood, not shiny. My father’s books, almost all of them.

I look at those books, my eyes trailing along the spines, during afternoons when the house is quiet and I must find something to do.

I do it a lot in the English house where the books are up on the second floor, on the landing that overlooks the staircase that winds up from the little hallway below. Here the books are in white bookshelves that have glass doors you slide back and forth. I search for something to hold my interest. I look and look, looking at the same lined-up spines I looked at last time, hoping to notice something I have not noticed before.

The carpet is flat and a dull green. This is a rented house, this one in England. The landing is narrow. There is only room for the bookcases and a narrow space to walk. The landing is bounded by a railing – white posts with a black shiny railing along the top. Without that fence you would fall into the hole made by the staircase.

At the top of the stairs there is no bookcase and a little more space. My mother has put there a large black trunk that we used when we came here. You can sit on its broad surface and your feet don’t touch the ground. There’s a long window above the trunk with a white window sill. My mother has a row of plants along the sill. She has African violets there and when one of them blooms she says, “Look!” in a high voice. “A flower!”

I sit on the trunk with my little sister. I have an idea for a newspaper we could make. I can see this beautiful newspaper we will make and I can see how we will be able to make it every week. We will make it and sell it and I see this beautiful thrilling future that will inject my life with that mysterious ingredient that kids who live in books have.

My room is at the top of the stairs, its door right by the big trunk. My mother bought me a desk. She painted it white. It didn’t have any paint when it came from the store. She painted it and put it behind the door of my room. She got me the desk because now I live at home. I used to go to boarding school but I am back here now. I didn’t want to come back to my mother’s world. I thought I did for a moment. Being in boarding school was like being in my father’s world, the world outside the house.

But that didn’t matter when my friends at school turned mean. I didn’t want to go back there. I asked to come back here. I imagined it might be like Little House in the Big Woods and that I’d sit at the dining room table every evening doing homework with my sister, with soft lamplight. But it wasn’t that way.

The curtains in my room are a deep bright red. They go down to the floor and you open and close them by pulling a cord. This is fancier than our house in America. It feels like a hotel. My bed is in the corner, under the window above the garage so I know when my parents come back on the nights they go out. The babysitter is downstairs but I do not feel safe in bed until the sound of the car pulls in under my window and the headlights fan across my dark ceiling.

Along the landing is also a door. When you open it it’s just a bunch of wooden slats you can hang things from. It’s extra warm in there because of a water heater or something, and my mother hands wet laundry in there to dry. She calls it the drying cupboard, another strange English thing.

My father goes on business trips. Hanging on the wall on the landing are two small drawings, each framed in gold wood. The drawings are like scribbles in black ink on white paper. My father said he got them from a friend, some man he met on one of the trips. The man was scribbling during their meeting and my father asked him for the drawings. My father described how the many shrugged, sure, not seeing them as something of any value. The two pictures hang, one above the other, by bookcases, near my father’s room. They aren’t pretty, but when I look at them I remember that my father goes to other places and meets people that the rest of us will never see.

DARK NIGHT

The floor is hard smooth cold linoleum. It is my first Manhattan address. I am so glad to have my own place in New York City. It is something I have wanted for a long time, especially since I met the New York City boy who became my boyfriend. He has a place in New York City. He’s always had one. He grew up here, which is something I will unfortunately never be able to claim, that will always be a drawback, but at least I am here now.

I feel at home in this city, moving on its subways and sidewalks. I feel like I belong here, but somehow when I come inside into this room New York City leaves me, its influence recedes and I am exposed as the girl without friends and nothing to do.

But who can I be friends with? The girl in science lab? She’s so drab. The other girls in the suite? I like it when they’re there when I come in, sitting around the table in the hall by the black wall phone, but I can’t sit down with them, they know each other, I don’t know what to say to them, my words sound hollow, I hate saying empty words like: how as your day, like: it’s so cold out – I say a few things to them and then I slip into the room at the end of the hall that is mine.

My boyfriend has an apartment where he goes to school in another town, a place with Salvation Army furniture and a tiny kitchen that he cooks big meals in. He has a TV and a stereo and a long shelf of records he’s been listening to for years. He has a phone and a bong and an electric typewriter. When I am there it feels like something is always happening. He is always on the move, always moving – lighting the bong, wanting to go out for pizza or Chinese or a movie, watching TV, buying a record. I do all these things with him.

And then when I am here and he is not, none of those things interest me though I know he is in his town, doing that endless string. He never says, I don’t know what to do. Never pauses. Never walks just to walk.

At night, it’s cold out, I return to this room, so small. Thank God no one can see me in here with these books I have looked at, lined upon the shelves, so many times. There are no curtains or shades on the window. It is a blank black square. How can I get through the few hours of evening. I must stay awake until 11 because then my boyfriend will call. He will be wide awake and I will pretend that I am too.

But I long to hear his voice, the tangle of his scratchy voice that wraps me in a blanket, wraps me. I clutch at its comfort, wondering when it will be taken away.

POTENCY

I think that writing memoir is the most potent action I can take in this world.

When I sit down to write – not an easy place to get to – I feel all my energies and abilities come into one focus, one laser point – I feel like a bird, pausing in mid-air, then plummeting down into the waves, intent on that one fish that will save it.

I write, then come up for air, then look at what I have unearthed. It usually looks like just a handful of dust, not worth much. I could easily toss it out and forget about it. But I don’t. Not anymore. I add it to the pile. I am not sure what I am building, but this is all I have. For some reason, it is my most precious thing, the one thing that feels purely my own.

A Long Grey Dress

My sister wears a grey dress, a frumpy cotton one with a belt and a longish full skirt, so old-fashioned and out of place that it’s cool. I would never have noticed that dress if I’d seen it, never have thought to put such an ugly thing on, but I admire this quirky choice. Her long light brown hair is scooped back with a red bandana.

She is different than she used to be. She used to be nothing, someone who stayed below the radar, who kept to her place as number two, as younger sister who couldn’t do much.

She is stronger now, more daring. She is 15 and I am 18. She even looks pretty to me now. And I am unsure of every step.

She has a boyfriend, now, after the episode, and a few months later another one. They make dandelion wine in my mother’s kitchen. She says she won’t eat meat anymore. She is angry, defiant, daring us to stop her.

My mother is frightened. I am frightened too.

The night she swallowed the pills I am in the kitchen, home from college, Christmas vacation, a dark evening, back home, everything quiet. My parents are reading in the living room, separately. Each sister is in her own room. There’s no music playing, no conversation. This is normal.

I hear my sister call downstairs for my mother. I just keep going with the dishes at the sink. Everything is still normal. A minute or two later my mother comes downstairs and says that Chris has swallowed pills, they must take her to the hospital. This is severe and new and I have no script at all for this. Any word I say sounds wrong so I do not say much besides, “okay.” I don’t see my sister. I stay in the kitchen and the three of them leave the house.

My smallest sister, 6 years old, comes into the kitchen now. She is wearing small gold-framed glasses. She walks into my arms and starts to cry. “It’s okay,” I say, wanting to comfort her. “It’s all right.”

Something in me is just stunned and unmoving. We go to see her in the hospital a day or two later, my mother driving Esther and me. We try to be normal. It is embarrassing to have nothing to say after such a big event. Surely there is the right thing to say right now to lipe up to something this big – my 15-year old sister’s suicide attempt. If this were a movie there’d be tons of dialog. But there isn’t anything, except now I move to New York City as planned, to the new school, into a cold grey winter, me in my room alone at night not knowing how to enter a life that would have people in it. There must be something very very wrong with me that no one is coming, that I am alone here. This flaw must never ever be seen by anyone.

I stopped eating that winter.

RED DIRT SONG

My father stretched out on his back in satisfaction. It was the weekend so he was home. This time everyone had gone on this walk. We had driven somewhere – my father driving, wearing “black glasses” – that’s what he called them, and I still think of the word “sunglasses” as an unnecessarily fancy word that other people use.

My father drives, his thick fingers on the steering wheel, his arm out the open window, rapping his gold wedding band on the metal roof of the car in time with the song he is singing, a Hungarian song that I sing along with. I know the tunes and the strings of syllables that go with them. We sing loud and look out straight ahead at the road.

My mother sings too though more softly and she looks out the side window. She is dressed in brown colors, smaller than my father.

My and my little sister are in the backseat. She is doing something. I don’t pay attention. I lean forward a little, between the two front seats, singing.

My mother points and says how the dirt in Virginia is red. She likes this the way she liked that the boards in our New York house were wide and therefore old. The dirt she points to doesn’t look red to me. It looks rusty brown. Red is the color of my new ski jacket.

We walk uphill through woods. At the top we stop. My parents point at all the hills and woods spread out in the front of us. This when my father lies down on the smooth rock, propped up so he can keep looking, his suit jacket around his shoulders like a cape. My mother says, “Look at the view!” in the same way she talks about the red dirt.

HIM & ME

I look at the scenes of my childhood as if from a distance, watching the small dark-haired child with bangs. She is in the living room. Her father sweeps into the room, or out of it, always speaking with some kind of flourish as if he were perpetually on stage, as if he feels always that he is being watched. the child is the one who is watching him and this pleases the father very much. He looks back at her. They look at each other, and the father always makes sure he is worth watching.

That’s what it’s like, my father always wanting to be a personality, someone you remember and want to tell other people about, the way my father liked to tell me about the elderly gentleman who, when all the families of the Budapest apartment building were seeking shelter in the basement of the building while the Germans bombed, while they were all crowded into one room, this elderly gentleman complained when his wife brought him a cup of tea in a cup that did not match the saucer. This image was stamped in my father’s mind and I could tell by the way he repeated it to me – usually on our walks together, he and I walking together every weekend, he inviting me to come with him – not my mother, not my younger sisters – which made sense: we knew Mum and Dad did not like each other, and the two sisters were too young. Though I had walked with my father when I was their age. So I am the perfect choice – for my father the walks are his chance to talk to me. He talks without stopping in the car which is parks a thte entrance to the park which is a huge stretch of land with roads, fields and woods – even a house or two – we walk for two or three hours without seeing anyone else and my father talk the whole time. I am mostly quiet next to him, walking.

There is the walk when he asks me what word we use in school for a boy’s penis. I am in first grade, and we do have a word for this. “Wiener,” I answer, surprised to be entering this territory with my father. This kind of thing I only talk about with my friends. It doesn’t exist at home. I am alone with my father. We are in the woods and he tells me what men and women do. I listen. I know it is a secret.

There is a walk many years later, in the big park, on a Sunday, my mother left behind in the house where she is cooking lunch – roasting beef, boiling potatoes, chopping salad – while my sisters play cards upstairs – we are walking and my father is telling me something about the Catholic church and pope. He asks me something and I only half-respond. This angers him. “Come on,” he says, prodding me. I am supposed to converse and I don’t want to. I don’t know why I’m this angry. I know I am wrong and bad for not speaking. I wish I could cover up what I’m feeling and let something smooth and entertaining and smart roll off my tongue, but it is stuck. I have failed. the same way my mother fails, the same way my sisters fail, by being ordinary and uninteresting.

In the House

I sit in the living room with the grown-ups, my parents’ friends. I am surrounded by them. They are talking to each other, laugh laugh laughing, drinking their grown-up drinks.

We are in this house. I came here with my mother and father. There were workmen here for awhile. They sat down at lunch time at the bottom of the hill, outside, where we park our yellow car. They ate big thick sandwiches. My mother stood in the kitchen wiping white paste onto the walls with a wide metal knife. There were no guests then. Now there are.

My mother goes up the stairs. I can see her bare legs through the railings as she goes up. I can’t see her head, her face. Just her legs going up.

“Joan,” says one of the women near me, “your legs are so scratched! You must have been working outside!”

This makes my mother different from the other women here. Their legs will never be scratched like my mother’s. they don’t work outside like she does. They wear stockings and skirts. My mother is outside a lot. She likes the garden. I can tell that she is the ugly one here, the one the others do not like. My father is here with the guests. My mother is separate from them.

I can tell she is separate also because of how she is not smooth the way they are. Her face doesn’t really laugh or smile the way theirs do. Her laugh is not a real laugh. She looks like a kid in school who is pretending. She sits on the edge of the couch.

They call her Joan. Even her name is like a rock, weighing her down. It is as if the other grown-ups are standing on one side of a lake all together, close together, looking at her, laughing at her – not in a big obvious way but in their eyes. My father is with them.

I pull away from my mother. I don’t want to be like her, unable to protect herself.

It is the same house that we come back to many years later after living in England, but it has been made to look like a much more acceptable house, a house like ones that other people live in. I like it better. It isn’t the place with broken glass in the dirt all around it anymore. Beige wall to wall carpet covers the bare boards that used to put splinters in my feet.

It doesn’t have Hungarians in it anymore. Those bands of grown-ups don’t come anymore. Once or twice some couple from my father’s office comes, and he runs out that morning to shop for things my mother doesn’t think are necessary.

The people never come back a second time. I know my father always wants to impress them. He asks me to pull up all the grass that has grown up in the white stone path that leads to the front door, and after lunch he asks me to play the piano for everyone. I resist as nicely as I can, but my father always presses and presses and I have to play. My playing is laden with mistakes. Though I have good intentions, I never practice and dread the weekly lesson with the unfriendly English woman.

After the people leave – they drive back to the city – I do the dishes. My father goes to read. My mother goes to read. My sisters are each reading in their rooms. Sunday.

We gather in the evening in the living room to watch Masterpiece Theater. The TV is small enough to be moved from room to room, a black and white. We put it on the coffee table. My father sits on the couch with my mother and sisters. I sit on the floor, my back against the couch. The Brandenburg concerto pipes up as the show opens and Alistair Cook, a dapper Englishman welcomes us. My father is the one who speaks, who says something. He is happy to be watching the show. He likes Alistair. He would like to be Alistair with his nice English accent, dressed well, sitting amongst good furnishings. My mother doesn’t say much but she is smiling. I want to watch the story, but I want to stay far away from my parents, as far away as I can.

Then

The dining room table was made of smooth dark polished wood, its corners rounded. It sat on curved legs, each of which ended in a wooden carved claw clutching a wooden carved ball, a feature that my father pointed out to me privately in his Hungarian accent as an indicator of a proper antique. He admitted that it wasn’t a real antique, but an excellent reproduction.

The table consisted of two halves that were supposed to cleave together seamlessly, but the seam was always falling apart, just enough for us to keep pushing it together, pushing from each end so that the little wooden pegs slipped snugly into the little holes – and there, for a moment, it held, until the moment we released and then it sagged again, the two halves letting go of each other.

On top of the two wooden halves of the table were two protective glass halves. I wished we could get rid of the glass. That’s what really ruined it for me.

My father had bought the table and the six matching chairs that surrounded it. He bought them when we lived in England and crammed them into the tiny dining room of the rented house there. He bought them, he said, as a birthday present for my mother. I knew he bought them for himself. It was obvious. My mother never would have chosen them, but she packed them up and brought them back with us to the States when we returned.

We only sat at this table on weekends, the only time during my high school years that all five of us came together in one room.

My father sat at the end of the table farthest from the kitchen. The room didn’t hold much more than the table and its chairs. A small glossy piano fitted into the corner. We had brought it back from England too. My piano teacher, Daphne Spotiswood, a woman with an English accent who felt she was meant for better things, came to lunch on a Sunday once with her husband. With pride that we had an instrument, my father invited her with a flourish to play. She sat at our piano and played Mozart and Beethoven, music that our piano had never heard before. “It has a frightful sound,” said Ms. Spotiswood when she stood up, “not a good instrument at all.” We couldn’t tell. And even if we could we would not have said so.

My mother sat at the end of the table closest to the swinging kitchen door. I did most of the carrying back and forth. My mother had done the cooking. Now it was my turn. I wore jeans I had bleached in the bathtub, hoping they would come out differently than they did, patched with pieces of cloth left over from sewing projects that also never came out the way they should. Things I made did not come out the way I wanted them to. I did not know how to make things that satisfied. They fell short. I knew they always would. Just like my mother’s cooking and her sewing and her driving. She didn’t do things well and I knew I didn’t either. Not things I had to do with my hands.

My father initiated most of the conversation with false cheer, a smile on his face, a brightness that I knew was battling back blackness. We must all battle it back. “And what have my daughters been doing this morning?” His questions that I never ever wanted to answer, questions that instantly criticized whatever it was I had been doing – listening to a long-haired boy on the radio who sang about hitchhiking. I answer with as short an answer as possible. If it is too short it will draw attention. No, just enough to keep the scene going as it is.

“Your salads are always delicious, Joan,” my father says. It is one of the good things he has come up with to say to her. My mother doesn’t accept the compliment, doesn’t believe in it any more than I do. The salad is lettuce, tomato, oil, lemon and a little sugar. It always tastes the same. And yes, I like it too, but that has nothing to do with it.

The easiest moment is when my mother asks my father, or he asks her, “Did you see the joke in the New Yorker?” and they share a small moment of humor. They like the same cartoons.

When we are done I clear the table and do the dishes. My father retires to the couch, my mother goes up to her room, my sisters to theirs. I go upstairs too, to my attic room. And then there is quiet.

CRASH

The parking garage today on 24th St. looked exactly like the garage I crashed in in Los Angeles, the summer of '79, the same downward slope and sharp turn to the left, just like that time when the gas pedal of the Mercedes jammed and the car wouldn't stop – instead picking up speed as it sailed down the ramp -- and I let it crash into a wall, thinking I was driving into concrete and not caring. The car broke right through. It was a plaster wall and didn't even make a dent, though the new paint job was scuffed up, the ugly army green paint job that Jeffrey had found on a late-night local TV ad – they'd paint your car for $50. He asked for chocolate brown and didn't say anything, standing in a car lot in East Los Angeles by himself when they handed it back, now dull army green, like a tank.
It was an old Mercedes Benz with four doors. I don't know how many miles per gallon it got. I was 18 and didn't ask that question. A car either went or it didn't. My orange and white, hand-me-down Pinto went fine as long as you poured oil into it every fifty miles or so. Jeffrey's Mercedes was a hand-me-down from his uncle Elliott. That was the kind of hand-me-downs Jeffrey got. I always felt like a poor relative, no way able to keep up. In the beginning, when I'd only see him on weekends, I pretended to be as rich as he was. I got paid on Fridays so I could show up Friday evening with a lot of money -- $40 – and I learned quickly to just stuff it in the front pockets of my jeans like he did – no wallet – just crumpled up bills and if you spilled one or two it didn't matter.
The day I crashed the Benz in L.A. was the day my mother and twelve-year-old sister were coming to visit. I hadn't seen them for a couple of years, since me and Jeffrey drove out to California from New York. I wasn't supposed to come out with him. California was Jeffrey's plan. He had always said it with offhand confidence, like it had already happened: he'd go to L.A. and write screenplays and become a director. People liked him for having such a good answer when they asked him what he was doing. When they turned to me and asked, my answer didn't seem to hold any water at all. "I want to be a writer." Even I didn’t believe me.
Then when Jeffrey was actually leaving for L.A. he said I could come too, which felt good after our last few horrible months in New York when mostly we fought, or I felt so depressed I wanted to jump off the 13th floor balcony but all I could do was think about it.
Jeffrey said I must be allergic to sugar to be so depressed. After all, he loved me. It shouldn't matter – why should it matter – that he has become friends with Harriet, a woman in the screenwriting class he signed up for at the New School, a woman – not a girl – a woman who's in her thirties, who has a little daughter called Jessie and who is writing the paperback for Saturday Night Fever. It's not supposed to matter that he sleeps with Harriet -- who has a daughter and her name on book covers -- on the designated nights when we're supposed to be having our own lives and I go up to my tiny room on Amsterdam Avenue in the apartment where I don't know anybody. I look at the artsy postcard Harriet sends Jeffrey. It’s romantic to send your lover a postcard when you live in the same city and see each other every few days. Jeffrey leaves the postcard out on the dresser. It has a cryptic message only he and she understand and she uses just her initials to sign it.
On the afternoon of the car crash and my mother-and-sister visit, I have also just been fired. That day. From Fotonovel where I've been answering the phones up front. A Hollywood job. At Fotonovel they make paperback books out of movies. They take the still photographs from the movie and add in white cartoon bubbles of dialog above the faces of the actors. The boss is named Herb – handsome, young and rich. He's treated a little like a god. "Herb said this." Herb doesn't want that." Herb hardly notices me, the girl up front who cut her hair last night in her living room, stabbing at herself without a mirror.
I get fired that afternoon. I don't know why. I've hated the job, but I didn't expect to get fired. I always hate my jobs – hate the desk I sit behind until 5 o'clock, hate the phone and the typewriter that keep me pinned. At Fotonovel I look up to the "artists," the people who disappear into tiny cubicle-offices to paste up the pages of the next book. I'm just the receptionist, wondering how anyone gets out of this, makes the jump to "artist."
Jeffrey's done it. Was never a problem for him. The first day in class he told me he'd finished a novel. He showed it to me – a beautiful stack of white, crinkly typed pages. I read them, alone in my little dorm room, alone in New York City, read my boyfriend's novel and didn't like it, not really, but at least he could do it, could sit down at a typewriter and write.
I wrote at my office desk sometimes, wrote stories about strange, unhappy, crazy people. It was easy to imagine being crazy. It seemed much more true than writing about regular people. Jeffrey wrote about regular people all the time – good-looking white people who were witty and fucked each other easily. My people had problems, were stuck way out on the outside, but I tore them up, tore up the yellow pages from the legal pad, cried in the stairwell when Herb fired me, drove downtown to pick up my mother and little sister and crashed into a cement wall that snapped like a paper plate.

HOPING TO FIND

I am in Manhattan, the right place to be, and it is summertime. I like the heat. I like the ground under my feet. I like the early mornings in Riverside Park that feels as fresh as the country and I like the sidewalks. I walk them fast. I walk from my newfound apartment on West 91st 50 blocks downtown to my office near Bryant Park.

I have just moved back to New York and I feel huge energy in my body. I wear sneakers to work so I can walk and walk. And when I get to the silly office I don’t change. I keep them on all day with my long skirts, like the blue dress that my friend Thea gave me. It’s kind of a perfect dress with long sleeves and buttons down the front, a bright soft royal blue cotton with a pattern of small flowers. It was expensive, a dress I would not have been able to buy. It’s one of the reasons I like it so much.

Thea is rich because she’s a model. I’ve never known a model before. She didn’t use to be a model. She started off just being the girl in the room next to mine in the dorm about 4 years ago. But then she became a model – I don’t know how – and she gave me this dress. I want to be friends with Thea. She fits my idea of a friend. She is beautiful in an interesting way. She and I talk often in small restaurants about how we want to make art. She has a big loom in her small dark apartment. She doesn’t use it much. But she tells me when she does. It is a big accomplishment. Just like I tell her when I write something. We talk about the books we are reading. she works in an art gallery. But she always seems far more lucky and well placed than me. She has a lot of friends in that gallery world that I never meet. I just hear about them, fabulous people. I am afraid to meet them and she does not suggest it either. I am not part of that world, but I wish I was.

I am released in these first few months from all the years that have led up to this. I have spent five years with one boyfriend, deep with one boyfriend in a small private world, and I have been creeping out of it for the past year, first moving out from the little Hollywood cottage we shared for three years, a white Hollywood cottage shaded by almost jungle greenery, lime-green shag carpet inside, a kitchen floor of yellow linoleum sticky with oil spilled from his plug-in fryer, the living room with it brown vinyl-topped coffee table grey with ashes from the blue ceramic pipe we light every day, the color TV on a small table with wheels, the brown couch, the small cloudy fish tank tucked into a built-in bookshelf that has one creature in it that looks like a mushroom. Jeffrey has not cleaned that tank for months and months. He cleans the two other tanks, large ones on wooden stands, colorful with saltwater fish – he doesn’t want anything so normal as freshwater fish. No, they are saltwater tropical fish that he buys at a large store on a broad, half-empty street south of here, outside the activity of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, some boulevard that has no palm trees or flowers or plants of any kind – just this big aquarium store he can go to during the day while I am working to find another colorful fish to bring home. He used to go shopping for used records. Now it’s fish.

I got out of that house. I didn’t know how to leave. Though I thought about it often. It was easier to stay and do the same thing over and over. I left in a furious fight. The kind where you leave in the middle of the night and slam the door and don’t care where you go next you just have to go. Except this time I knew where I’d go. I’d seen that building with apartments for rent and I drive there and I park outside in the dark on the street and I put the driver’s seat back as far as it will go and I sleep uncomfortably until morning, until the place opens up and I rent a furnished apartment there, just one big room really, but I like the bright blue of the bathroom and just that it’s mine.

And a year later now in Manhattan, alone now, acting out the part of a girl who doesn’t have a longterm boyfriend anymore though I know I could turn around and go back there so easily, I drink in all the energy I can take from the being here, as if I were shot out of Los Angeles on a rubber band and I can ride it and ride it and I hope I can ride it long enough to get somewhere before I run out of certainty.

TIME AFTER TIME

The first time I came to a workshop I wore a white button-down shirt and white jeans. These were my most worldly clothes and I wore them on purpose, wanting to be very much of this world – nitty and gritty – and not so much of the ashram world where decorum and modesty were de rigeur. No ripped jeans there.

I drove up here on a Saturday in August. You could borrow a car from the transportation department and pay 10 cents a mile. You filled up the tank at the pump at Beaver Dam – Beaver Dam it was called, the place where all the blue collar stuff at the ashram went down – the garage where the shuttle buses were serviced, the place where the earth-moving machinery was kept, the architectural offices, the plumbing, the key-making, the HVAC. I didn’t hang out much at Beaver Dam. There were a few women there, but not many.

It’s all empty and deserted now. Scary even. Maybe you can drive in now. More likely someone will stop you and ask what you’re doing there. Nobody is supposed to be there.

My mother lives just down the road from Beaver Dam now and all the other ashram buildings. When you drive down the road to her house, down the road I used to travel long before she was there, day after day for years on the shuttle bus, wondering when this time in my life – these endless shuttle rides, every 20 minutes a new shuttle setting out on the circuit – wondering when these rides would ever end. Not that I disliked them. It just felt like I’d be there forever, rattling by the golf course on what was once a school bus but we had painted them a dark royal blue when we found out that it’s illegal to drive yellow school buses. You have to repaint them.

When you drive down that road now the golfers are still golfing. They’re still there as if nothing has happened, and you look across and there’s the bubble-gum-pink dome of the Mandap, still there, as out of place against the Catskill landscape as ever.

The Mandap too is empty, deserted for years, a vast glass pavilion – high clear glass walls, a marble floor, once so filled with people, music, color, drama. Gone. The building still standing there. I bet there are people who wish they could just erase it. I’d be embarrassed by it if it were mine – empty, deserted. It’s all like that. Almost a small town, a robust vibrant culture, that kept 1,000’s of people occupied mentally and physically – a place where babies were born, crushes were had. A place where people worked hard hard hard – staying up late until every pot was cleaned, every penny counted because this was the guru’s house and this was the guru’s money – and then getting up early in the dark the next day and doing it all again – as people thronged in the bookstores, in the small restaurants where delicacies were served to those who could afford them, where the thick carpets were vacuumed every day, where there were systems for everything, and places where all day long there was utter silence when you entered, places that felt holy and separate, where you didn’t doubt that the sacred was present because it was so easy to feel it and see it in the beauty of the silk, the fresh flowers, the sparkling bronze, in the way the woman minding the oil lamps sits just like you do when it’s your turn – demure, legs folded under a wide loose skirt, stocking feet, hoping you have an easy shift with no weirdo, no man who’s never been here before and wants to sit on the women’s side and doesn’t get why he can’t.

This place where everything made sense – the people are gone. There’s a few in there, but you can’t see them. They live in secret. No one is allowed in. I try to look through the fences as I drive by, but I can’t see.

I drive the same roads that were as familiar as the lines on my hand, trying to re-enter them, but I can’t re-enter. I drive by the tall berms that were created – they used to have oceans of wild flowers all over them and me and my friend – I don’t remember her name – a small blond woman who could sing well, a woman I was friends with even as I knew our friendship lived in an artificially small box – she and I often walked along those berms, before dinner, talking.

She sang me a line once from a song she had written. She sang it once, tentatively. It was a song about the guru, and she’d only gotten as far as that first line. And that’s all she would ever write of it. And even that was daring.

Freeze Up

We are driving home from some place local. It is night. My father is driving, my mother in the passenger seat. I am in the back seat with both younger sisters. The parents are arguing. Us in the back seat aren’t saying anything, looking out the windows on either side, thinking hard of other things. I’m in high school. I am used to my parents fighting, though it still scares me and I always wish for it to stop. I am used to this tension, this rising rising tension that my mother never seems to feel because she always keeps going, sawing away at my father who turns rigid. He answers with two or three words at a time, trying to get her to stop. It’s as if he is telling her to stop and she doesn’t hear or doesn’t care. Doesn’t she hear? I know that if I were talking to him right now I would know to stop, but my mother keeps going.

“That’s enough,” my father says in his Hungarian accent that I have heard all my life. He has stopped the car. In the dark. On a hill that slopes downward. It’s one of the many roads near our house, familiar. “I will walk home from here,” my father says. And he gets out of the car and slams the door.

My mother doesn’t say anything. She has stopped talking. She gets into the driver’s seat and we drive the four minutes home in silence.

It’s embarrassing. I want to pretend nothing has happened. This is the place that is comfortable to me. Pretending nothing has happened.

“Good night, Mum,” I say as we get out of the car, doors slamming. “Thanks for taking us to the movie.”

I thank my mother a lot. After every meal, whenever she takes me somewhere.

I walk up the two flights of stairs to my room at the top of the house. My sisters and my mother sleep one floor below me. My father sleeps on the ground floor. They are far far away.

UNRAVEL

Shayna had the girls on weekends. That was the arrangement now. Her on weekends. Us during the week. The little waft of friendship between her and Natvar was over, but things were cordial.

On April 1, 1984 she brought them back. It was Sunday evening. She joined us for dinner.

“I don’t think the girls should live here anymore,” she said. “They’re going to come back with me, back to Staten Island.”

I new Shayna had grown up on Staten Island, that her parents still lived there, that her dad was an ex-cop.

I sat in my chair at the table. Sometimes Natvar said that this was the only home he had ever known and that were his favorite people. He said that sometimes to me, Tracy and Mark. Sometimes he acted like Tracy was his favorite, like the time he took her shopping to Bloomingdales alone – just him and her – and they came back and Tracy had two pairs of strappy fabulous high heels. I was jealous. Not of the shoes, of Natvar’s attentions.

Most of the time he liked Mark the best (not counting the girls, of course). Mark was the one he slept with in the room at the end of the corridor across from mine. It was a dark corridor with no light at all if the door at the front was closed. A corridor that held four rooms – three on one side, one on the other. Each room had its own door, stained a deep red. We, or rather Mark and Natvar had hung each door, something we had been told was very hard to do.

“I think all his clients just want to sleep with him,’ I’d said to Mark once. “Do you?” he’d answered. And then, “It’s not that big a deal.” But Mark was the one who slept with Natvar and it was a big deal. He had more of an ally here than Tracy or me.

There were moments too when I was suddenly the favorite, when I said something witty, when I shoplifted caviar before a guest came for dinner, and these were savored moments when Natvar’s warmth felt very real. His wrath and dissatisfaction were much more common though.

He began to shout at Shayna. “What can you offer my children? Nothing. A laxy good-for-nothing from Staten Island. Look at Tracy. Look at her. She goes out and works every day. Does she complain? No, she never does. She doesn’t expect anyone to take care of her, not like you.”

Tracy sat demurely in her in her full wool skirt, the one she wore almost every day. Her face was serious, her eyes cast down. I never knew that Natvar had valued Tracy’s job so much, or her, at all. He had never said those particular nice things about her before, but he was saying them now.

We have spread out from the dining room table. Natvar is standing, Mark is too. Shayna is telling the girls to go get their things.

I am just watching Natvar, listening to his every word, trying to be at his pitch, to care the way he cares. He often says that I don’t care enough. Sometimes he says I am trying to sabotage his every move, that I am some kind of evil force that subverts beauty and freedom and life, and when he says that it feels true, and I feel hopeless and defeated.

So I am trying now as Natvar speaks to be right there at his side in whatever way I can. After all, he has said we are his family, his dearest friends.

Shayna picks up a votive candle that is burning on the altar to Laxmi, the goddess of abundance – it’s the donation box, the place visitors are supposed to leave money. She throws the candle at Mark. Mark storms towards her. Shayna turns to run down the corridor, and it’s all movement now and shouts. I follow Mark and Natvar down the corridor. I must stay near to Natvar. I must not allow myself to not be part of this.

Shayna is on the floor at the far side of the meditation hall. All the lights are blazing. Natvar kicks her a couple of times. “Putana! Putana!” he is yelling. I stand at his side, leaning forward with concentration, willing myself to be a part of this.

And then she is coming after me, and as she grabs my hair and pushes me, I feel something in me give, some plug is released and I am allowed to be furious the way Natvar is allowed to be furious and I give it all I’ve got. I bite her shoulder hard.

I have never bitten anyone. I have never thought about biting anyone. But this is what I do.

And then it is quiet and we are in the kitchen. Natvar is gently dabbing Shayna’s shoulder with a warm damp cloth. The children are subdued, snuffling. A cop came to the door in response to Phaedra’s 911 call, but we told him everything was all right and he went away.

It is about 1 in the morning. Shayna prepares to leave. She is subdued. Everyone is subdued.

We stand at the front door, a clump of us. Ariadne puts her arms around Natvar’s legs. “I want to stay with Daddy,” she says. “Oh, my little love,” says Natvar and strokes her plae blonde hair.

“I’m going with Mommy,” says Phaedra. She is defiant, her jaw is strong. Shayna and Phaedra clump down the stairs, the ones we painted blue. To make them look like Greece.

NEVER READY

We painted the metal stairs a bright blue, the last couple of flights anyway -- the ones right outside our door -- and the walls a clean white. “Like Greece!” Natvar said with booming satisfaction. He spoke of Greece as a better place than America. I was used to that. My father had always spoken of Europe as a better place where people had style and class. And my mother too, a Canadian, had often used the adjective “American” pejoratively. Sometimes, when she wanted to complain about her kids being spoiled or whining she would say we were “so American.” So Natvar’s words about Greece being better than America felt familiar, and I could align myself with them more easily than either Tracy or Mark, both of whom were American to the core.

My father visited the Institute where we treated him so well that he began to come once a week, traveling in from Westchester County where everything had fallen apart for him – no job, no house. He suggested to Mark that he could help out with the books – my father no trained accountant, but it was one of the newspaper ads he had been answering lately, jobs that gave him an hourly wage. And so, for that winter, he came once a week, to do something or other in the office, to have lunch and take a nap on our sofa, which had once been his sofa. When he’d had a house.

My parents were living in a quaint and charming renovated barn on a property that belonged to the Frick family, the ones who have the museum. It was a large and empty estate, with empty stables and this gatehouse where my parents could stay for free to give outsiders the illusion of occupancy. They had landed this gig through someone my father met at the local Catholic church, something else he had taken to doing during these hard times.

My father invited Natvar out to the house and we all went on several weekends, even staying over. Natvar liked it out there, just like my father did. So much style and class. The fireplace was huge, the ceiling tall, everything made of wood. Mark found a book in the shelves inscribed by Edith Sitwell. I was glad to have this house to offer to the group. We went out there in the beat-up car my mother had passed on to us. Sometimes we brought Ellie, in her floor-length fur coat and her cigars, a plump woman with a round face and graying hair and Greek too. Ellie liked to talk and philosophize and pronounce. The only person who could converse with her was Natvar, and often they went at it in Greek with the three of us – me, Tracy and Mark – just kind of sitting there with expressions on our faces meant to convey that we were happy to be there.

My father met Ellie one afternoon at the Institute and the conversation turned to Hungarian folk dance and suddenly my father had grabbed Ellie in dance position and was whirling her around the room, both of them knowing exactly how it was done. This too gained me a point or two. Via my father, I was part of the Natvar-Ellie club for a moment. Europeans.

Natvar’s two daughters had moved in with us by then. They moved in once the carpet was down. I hadn’t seen it coming. Natvar’s wife, Shayna, with her long blonde hair, had started to visit Natvar, coming in from Staten Island. He showed her around with pride, although he had said so many things behind her back over the years and I had learned not to like her on principle.

They even went out on what looked like a date, and a few days later disappeared into the meditation hall for hours, Shayna having brought her massage table and offering her husband a massage. They were gone so long. It was so quiet back there.

And then the two little girls were living with us in the spare empty little room we had built. Phaedra the older at about 9, Ariadne about 6. Both blonde, but Phaedra the tougher one, Ariadne the softer, fluffier one.

Natvar spoke to his upper East Side clients – the ones with penthouses and servants -- and began a campaign to get his daughters into one of the schools that their children attended, schools with long waiting lists that Natvar was sure he could somehow overcome.

In the meantime, Natvar said I should homeschool the girls. After all, I was there all morning. I embraced the new job with pride, went to some store somewhere and bought a book to find out a little about the kinds of standards you had to meet if you were teaching kids at home, and we began.

Once Natvar and Tracy had left in the morning, and Mark had turned to his managerial duties, I went down the corridor to the little room where the two girls slept. One, wake them up. Two, give them breakfast. Three, get them to eat. Get everything done. Be firm. And sweet. Hit just the right note so that the girls are happy and when Natvar returns everything has been done perfectly and he can tell, by the atmosphere, that things are as they should be.

If their father was there the girls ate what he told them to eat. Without him, Ariadne hid her eggs in the couch and laughed when I tried to be stern. “You’re ugly!” they’d say, and I would feel ugly. I’d be nice if I could. But I can’t. I’m already in trouble. I can feel it. It’s just a matter of time.

FOOD

Now we don’t eat at Mark’s anymore. We don’t need to walk the six blocks there for breakfast and dinner, and lunch can be a hot meal eaten around a wooden table that came from Tracy’s house. She has left her husband and the pretty Long Island home they had made and she gave the pretty wooden table to the institute and we have it out at the front where you first walk in. There is thick burgundy carpet now over the splintery bare boards. This carpet. Natvar got a deal on it. It was the last touch. After the months of hammering, washing, painting, living with sheetrock dust, the carpet went down and everything is different.

There are little rooms now. We made them. And a narrow corridor that leads from the front with its wide tall windows overlooking the street to the back, the meditation hall – four times the size of the old one.

I miss the old Institute, when things were smaller. When they seemed finished and done and permanent, a place I could go to any time I wanted. Now we have a big thing going on, a big monster to feed all the time and I am running and worried all the time.

The wooden dining table is up front and we eat around it three times a day.

We eat breakfast there early, in the dark. Tracy makes it. She doesn’t like to. It makes her angry. We can all tell she is angry by how she bangs the pots in the small windowless kitchen we made. We put up three walls near the big utility sink where we used to wash the paintbrushes every night. We bought a real refrigerator and two hot plates. Natvar instructs us to put masking tape labels with the date on all the left-overs so that we know when something is too old and has to be thrown out.

Tracy is the breakfast cook because she has to leave and go to work. So it’s kind of like her contribution before she goes for the day. I don’t like that she’s angry about making breakfast. It seems a pretty light deal compared to having to be here all day. We eat and then sit in the meditation hall and chant. Natvar has made a more elaborate puja than the old one. This one has a raised platform. Baba’s chair, the one Natvar made yars ago, before I knew him – made of wood and purple velvet – sits up on the platform with Baba’s framed picture sitting on it.

I never met Baba. He’s Natvar’s guru. He’s my guru too. I’ve read his books and I like them. I think of Baba all during the day as if he were present and watching, and I try to do things the way he suggests. I try not to fight back when things don’t go my way. I try to try hard all the time.

Natvar dashes off to work as soon as the chant is over. He has several private yoga clients now, wealthy women across the East Side. This is new. He leaves, dressed up smart in a cap and a flowing overcoat that we got for him. He looks glorious, smiling, happy, swinging his colorful bag that one of the women gave him. He carries his yoga clothes in there, pressed white cottons that Tracy has handwashed and ironed.

Mark goes into the office, one of the little rooms we made. None of the rooms have windows, just the big open space at the front. Mark’s office has short counter and a filing cabinet. He is the manager of the Institute. He keeps track of the bills and the not-for-profit paperwork. There is never any money. We always are working with a handful of dollars. Natvar has taught us how to buy groceries that are cheap and last a long time – like Goya products in a can. Plus I shoplift because I can’t stretch the money like Natvar can. Natvar does everything better: he cooks the best, he relates to other people the best – look how he met Arianna and is now teaching half a dozen rich clients. But only I shoplift. And Natvar loves me for it.

I am wearing a woolen skirt, navy blue, narrow, past my knees. And stockings. And a pressed cotton blouse. This is not how I used to be when I was with Jeffrey, smoking pot as soon as I got home from work, wearing jeans and elegant scraps from the Salvation Army. This isn’t the me who hitchhiked alone across the country or the one who listened to records on the screen porch, decoding every Dylan lyric and mapping my future with Leonard Cohen songs.

I have scribbled all that out. In the very beginning I came to class high once and told Natvar, thinking he’d find it amusing, and I was so surprised when he said no, I couldn’t get high and be in his classes, that yoga and pot did not mix. How strait-laced, I thought. I thought Natvar didn’t follow rules like that.

But I haven’t smoked pot since then. And I wear these clothes that he says are better. “I don’t want us looking like a bunch of hippies,” he said. Hippies. I had always wanted to be a hippy. Had never wanted to be anything else.

But I was wrong.

I am nervous now that Natvar has gone. He will be back for lunch and I must have everything ready – I must make it the way he has shown me, but it seems he never likes what I do, even when I am careful. And I begin again, timing the rice.

I must also call the telephone company and work some magic so that they don’t charge us for the last three weeks. There’s no way we can pay that bill. Whenever Natvar talks to people they just love him so much they make all kinds of exceptions. He said I should call today and he told me what to say, he said it over breakfast, holding a piece of toast in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. And I had nodded and kept my face serious, taking it all in, knowing to give him every reason to have confidence in me even though we both know I will mess it up and he will be furious.

And I should type up more of the manuscript. When Natvar talks I write it down in the speedhand I learned in high school and then I type it up for him. But maybe I should vacuum first and the window sills up front are dusty and the stairwell should be washed. Everything must always be clean and perfect. There is no excuse for it not to be. It’s a sign of unconsciousness.

When Natvar flies in at one I have the table set but the rice isn’t ready. He is furious – “What have you been doing all day, woman?” he shouts. “Come on, Mark,” he says with a smile to Mark, “let’s you & I go down to Paul’s and get something decent. She can eat this crap if she wants.”

THE NEW LOFT

Phaedra sent an email a couple of days ago and of course I opened it and of course it was disappointing, a generic Christmas greeting with a photo of her son whom I have never met except maybe when he was a baby.

Phaedra lingers on the outside of my life, someone who doesn’t quite go away. She wanted to come visit a few months ago. It would have been about 15 years since I’d last seen her, but she wanted to bring her son and I suggested better she and I meet up first somewhere, that she and I have some earnest conversation first before we try to include other people, and though we exchanged a few emails about it, it didn’t happen and I felt for sure she wasn’t into it. She wanted a friendly chatty visit with nothing said. Sorry, Phaedra. I didn’t even go see her when she was in a play, though there was a pull, as if she were my daughter and I owed her.

Phaedra was the little girl who called 911 the night of April 1, 1984 from the top floor of a four-story walk-up on 29^th Street between 7^th and 8^th. She had blonde hair, brown eyes, teeth a little prominent. Her face was strong. She was about 9.

I lived on the top floor of that four-story walk-up with Natvar, Mark and Tracy. We had rented this godforsaken loft, or rather Natvar had rented it under the guise of the New York Institute of Classical Yoga, his yoga school of which the rest of us were protogées. When we took the place over back in September it was just bare broken down space. Four walls. One cold water utility sink. An old tin ceiling imprinted with a pattern. Bare splintery boards with sequins jammed into the cracks. The place had once been a sequin factory. Two narrow toilet stalls with wooden doors.

“We’ll make a yoga school here!” Natvar had said with great excitement and I had thought that my job was to support him and be equally as enthusiastic, to squash any impulse that didn’t contribute to that enthusiasm. I thought my job was to be as helpful as I could be. I thought that whatever Natvar wanted was more important than what I wanted.

Natvar was in his late 30s, tall but not towering. He was older than me, not a peer. He had a wife and two children. None of my friends had gotten married. Certainly none of them had children. I wasn’t thinking about marriage or children. I had been living in New York alone for a few months when I’d first gone to Natvar’s yoga school – not the new one that we were going to build, but the old one that was already established when I came – a small place, meticulously clean and orderly, a place where Natvar greeted me with huge enthusiasm as if he really thought I was exceptional and everyone around responded in kind, greeting me with great warmth.

I had stuck around more and more, the circles of my orbits getting smaller and smaller, until – wham – I moved in – not as a lover, but as a dedicated student – and now it is a year or two later when we take on the loft that is a bare cold bone that Natvar says we can make sumptuous and beautiful.

We work so hard. I sleep in the loft at night during the months of construction. Natvar and Mark sleep in Mark’s apartment a few blocks away. Tracy also returns to a home she has somewhere else at night. But this is my only home.

It is exciting to be with this group, to be with this Natvar, staying up late around the dinner table, a piece of marble broken in two that Mark found in the street, sitting around in Mark’s beat-up railroad apartment, eating the vegetable stew and brown rice that Camille has made, Camille who also has a nice apartment nearby but comes every night after her office job to shop and cook because she too believes in Natvar’s work.

I sleep on the floor of the loft. I wake up early and go back to Mark’s for breakfast, then back to the loft to chant with everyone for an hour before Tracy and Camille leave for their offices. Then I work with Mark and Natvar, Kenny comes too, a black man from Harlem who wandered in among us a few months ago and stayed.

We clean the floor, the walls – Natvar and Mark go to the hardware store for one long morning and in the afternoon things are delivered into the stairwell, things I’ve never heard of before – sheetrock we carry up sheet by heavy heavy sheet, long shiny studs, buckets of plaster, screws. Then Natvar climbs the tall ladder. He carries a screw gun. We hold the studs and he screws them up. We make the first wall, the back of the meditation hall, blocking off the two small cloudy windows. When he hits his thumb by accident he yells Greek swear words, and teaches them to us – scraps of Greek you cannot say in polite company – these phrases that are further evidence that we are on the outside, but we are special, we are irreverent, but we are real.

It feels very real. Natvar screaming at me for not having cleaned the paintbrushes properly the night before feels very real, very right, so different from the outside world of superficial conversations where people don’t say what they really think. Natvar can always say what he thinks. I must endure his fierce critiques, otherwise I will stay an ordinary person. Can I take my punishment?

It won’t always be like this. One day, if I hang in there, I will have Natvar’s abilities. That’s what yoga is all about – surrendering. If I weren’t so careless he would not have to get so angry. Sometimes Mark is Natvar’s target, sometimes Tracy. We all get it at one time or another. But then there are the quiet moments when he says he loves us. When he looks at me with his deep brown eyes, so brown, with his smile that knows he is cute when he smiles like that, when he says “only Marta” this or that, and it feels just as true as his fury.